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Investigation Finds No Plot In Killing Of Dr. King

After an 18-month investigation, the Justice Department concluded today that there was no evidence to support recent assertions of a plot to assassinate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and recommended no further inquiry in the case.

Prosecutors in the Justice Department's civil rights division who conducted the inquiry said in a report that they found no credible evidence that Dr. King was killed by conspirators who aided or framed James Earl Ray, who was sentenced to 99 years in prison for the murder.

Specifically, the investigators examined claims by Loyd Jowers, a former Memphis tavern owner, and by Donald Wilson, a former F.B.I. agent, as well as other assertions that the government or ministers associated with Dr. King were involved in the killing.

The investigation, which was ordered by Attorney General Janet Reno in August 1998, was narrower than the full reopening of the case sought by Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, and other members of the King family. They had urged President Clinton to appoint a national fact-finding commission.

Justice Department officials said today that they did not try to reinvestigate all the circumstances surrounding the April 4, 1968, killing.

Mr. Ray pleaded guilty to the killing in 1969, but three days later sought to withdraw his plea. Until his death in April 1998, Mr. Ray, the only person convicted in the case, said that he did not shoot Dr. King. Mr. Ray asserted that he had been implicated by a man he knew only as Raoul, a shadowy figure, who, according to others who supported the account, used Mr. Ray as an unwitting pawn to carry out the killing.

But today, the Justice Department's report concluded, ''The weight of the evidence establishes that Raoul is merely Ray's creation.''

The investigation has been a delicate matter within the Justice Department. Most officials regarded the case as closed and did not view the recent assertions as persuasive evidence of a wider conspiracy. But they have been unwilling to dismiss the claims or offend a politically powerful family with influential allies at the White House.

Dr. King's family released a statement today challenging the Justice Department's conclusion.

''We do not believe that, in such a politically sensitive matter, the government is capable of investigating itself,'' the statement said.

It asserted that a conspiracy to kill Dr. King involved ''agents of the governments in the City of Memphis, the State of Tennessee and the United States of America.''

Justice Department officials who conducted the inquiry said today that the assassination warranted no further investigation. Their findings echoed previous government investigations by the department, a House panel and the Shelby County district attorney's office in Tennessee.

The department investigation was headed by one of the government's top civil rights prosecutors, Barry Kowalski, who led government lawyers who successfully prosecuted police officers who beat the motorist Rodney G. King in California.

Mr. Kowalski said, ''We find no credible information to support allegations of a conspiracy to kill Dr. King involving Jowers, Raoul, the Mafia, Memphis police officers, figures involved in the Kennedy assassination, federal agents, U.S. military personnel or African-American ministers close to Dr. King.''

In 1993, 25 years after the murder, Mr. Jowers said that he, along with a Mafia figure, Memphis police officers and a man named Raoul, was part of a conspiracy to kill Dr. King. Mr. Jowers died of a heart attack last month at the age of 73.

Moreover, the report found no physical evidence to corroborate Mr. Jowers's account. For example, investigators at the time of the assassination found no footprints in the muddy ground behind the tavern, although Mr. Jowers said a gunman ran across the ground to hand him a weapon used in the assassination.

The investigators said that Mr. Jowers provided his account once under oath, but later repudiated it. In many retellings, the report found, ''he has contradicted himself on virtually every key point.''

Mr. Wilson said that as an F.B.I. agent working on the assassination, he took papers from Mr. Ray's abandoned car. Mr. Wilson said he concealed the papers for 30 years, even though they had the telephone number of an F.B.I. office and referred to ''Raul,'' apparently an alternate spelling of Raoul, and several people who had allegedly been connected to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Mr. Wilson said that someone, an unidentified person who later worked in the White House, subsequently stole the papers.

The report found that although Mr. Wilson said he wanted a government investigation of his accusations, he refused for six months to relinquish any documents. Finally, the report said he cut off communication with the Justice Department once he was offered immunity from prosecution.

The report said that investigators found nothing to support his assertions about the documents and that they noted that Mr. Ray himself had never said he remembered them.

The report dismissed a verdict reached last December by a civil court jury in Memphis, which ruled in favor of the King family. The family had sued Mr. Jowers for wrongful death. The jury concluded that Mr. Jowers and unidentified people and government agencies had conspired to assassinate Dr. King.

The report said the Memphis civil trial last year relied on a ''substantial amount of hearsay evidence.''